There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Engels

There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Engels

It’s long been an unwritten rule that on summer evenings, men will sit to chat and smoke their cigarettes on one of the window ledges of the shop next to the village mayor’s office in Malki Chiflik, and that women will sit on the other. Nobody knows why this should be, and few people question it in this forgotten corner of South East Europe where superstition and taboos have been rife for centuries.

In June 1913, just hours before the great earthquake struck to destroy eighty percent of local homes and livelihoods, Ekaterina Bakardzhieva, a maiden renowned for her exquisite appearance and unused but much discussed child-bearing features, placed her nether regions near to where Mitko the shopkeeper kept his onions, and soon the region’s walls came tumbling down. Such was the extent of her beauty that the proprietor had been overcome by the delight of seeing her recline on his gentlemen’s casement and consequently omitted to point out the bad luck and probable calamity that would arise from her sedentary faux pas. The nearby ancient city of Veliko Tarnovo had never before seen such devastation, and no female of our species had previously sat on the men’s window sill; the two unprecedented phenomena must have been linked.  Baba Zlata, the wise old woman who lived alone in the forest, confirmed that this was true. However, a wild and ferocious newt had knocked over her breakfast time cup of tea, staining her new long black cloak that she’d bought to wear for the next coven at her friend Baba Yaga’s cave, so she had been in a bad mood all day and wanted everybody else to be miserable too.

People had rarely spoken about this mysterious folklore byelaw. It was just assumed that everybody knew, but in Ekaterina’s case the consequences of her ignorance were catastrophic. She, of course, apologised profusely, and because she had up to that point brought so much joy and light to the lives of those around her, she was quickly forgiven. It took the municipality several years to rebuild the destroyed city but a village couldn’t survive without a shop and Mitko’s patience and suffering were rewarded with brand new premises relatively quickly. Having learnt from past mistakes, the architects’ plan included window sills of a more robust design. Suggestions that signs should be put up to indicate the different seating arrangements for ladies and gents were ignored as the top brass at the town hall, keen to save a few levs on their budget, remarked that they were already carved into the fabric of our mythos and didn’t need to be pointed out to anybody other than a fool.

For more than forty years the good folk of Malki Chiflik enjoyed warm fertile summers, cold cosy winters, ample crops in their fields, bountiful fruit harvests, and the arrival of many healthy babies. However, in 1954, on the eve of the swearing in of Todor Zhivkov as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party (i.e. prime minister… a sort of Boris Johnson with a chestful of medals and little risk of being unelected) unhappiness returned to the village for a couple of its residents.

Mariyka Karavelova was a young woman who, with her waist-length black hair and olive skin, radiated grace, elegance and beauty. As she passed, the menfolk would say zdrav kato kucher na mecar (здрав като куче на месар, an old Turkish saying that means ‘fwaww!’). Unfortunately, having grown beyond school leaving age she had shown great reluctance towards tilling the land, and refused point blank to make any contribution in the village cooperative’s combined effort to increase annual dairy output by fifteen percent. In short, she was getting on the nerves and under the feet of her poor mother. Storming off to her bedroom to escape the nagging, she would have to turn the volume knob on her Zenith gramophone up to eleven so she could hear the music of the State Ensemble for Folk Songs and Dances led by Philip Koutev above the noise of the shouting of the irritable matriarch preparing goats’ offal pickle in the kitchen below.

So one night when there wasn’t much on the telly, it was agreed at a meeting of the family’s secretariat for the development of production, prosperity and domestic bliss, that an amendment should be made to the current five-year plan to provide for dear Mariyka getting off her arse, finding a bloke and moving out. But how and when might the removal take place?

There was great excitement throughout the People’s Republic as the day of the new leader’s inauguration approached. Committees in every city, town, village and hamlet took to organising great parties the likes of which had never previously been seen and the Agriculture Minister announced that each household would receive an extra bag of flour, a complimentary jar of sows’ nipple ointment and a framed photograph of either Elvis Presley or General Secretary Zhivkov, subject to availability. The star’s looks and overtly sexual body language were a key part of his iconic status. He was known for his distinctive hairdo, often styled in a quiff, and his preference for bold, flamboyant clothing, including jumpsuits and sharply tailored lounge suits. Onlookers admired his sideburns, expressive facial features, and a captivating stage presence that melded sensuality and charisma. Women of all ages, and some men, swooned whenever his name was mentioned, which meant that poor old Elvis rarely got a look in.    

Mariyka saw the forthcoming event as the perfect opportunity to find her beau and escape the oppressive Marxist regime of her mum and dad’s house that had seemed to make her life a misery despite allowing her unlimited access to the family Lipetsk T-40 tractor and making her partly party to the Communist Party’s Workers’ Day party-planning party. She spent hours in front of her mirror dressing herself in her nosiya (носия, meaning ‘regional traditional clothing’) hoping it was one of those two-way Soviet spy mirrors and that handsome uniformed officers concealed behind it would be admiring her youthful feminine looks. After much preening and pondering she decided that she looked the bee’s patellae but worried that her tsarvili (цървули, meaning ‘dancing shoes’) that her great-grandmother had hand sewn from the carnal leftovers of a holy day feast (i.e. calf skin) might clash with her trendy bobby socks. She’d seen photographs of Debbie Reynolds wearing bobby socks in a glossy magazine that her aunt had smuggled back from a girlie weekend with her mates in Minsk and, filled with envy, had fashioned a pair for herself from a discarded fertiliser bag. As long as she didn’t remove her shoes, no one would see the words ‘contains synthetic ammonia’ printed on the instep of the left one.

She had a quick run through her repertoire of Todor Zhivkov fans’ songs (e.g. I’m Just Todor from the Bloc and There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Engels) that for weeks she’d been learning off by heart and singing into her combine harvester starting handle that doubled up as a pretend microphone.  Then, Matryoshka-dolled up to the nines, she made her way to find a seat in the village square where the festivities were to take place. Her friends, all similarly decked out in the traditional dress of the former Moesia region of Northern Bulgaria, superstitiously beckoned her to sit with them on the women’s window ledge to the left of the front door of the village shop. But, taking heed of her mother’s demands, she found a seat on the opposite sill, near to a strapping young lad called Aleksandar Radoslavov, about whom it was said that he’d do anything to get his hands on a young girl’s starting handle. So it was beside him that she sat, and all night they talked and sang, and danced and laughed whilst enjoying huge helpings of the older villagers’ home produced food and drink, and each other’s company.

Instantly their Balkan hearts fluttered like the pages of Das Kapital in the wind of change, and soon they became lovers. Three months later, to their parents’ delight, they were married in the little church of Sveti Atanas near the old military infirmary halfway up the hill and lived together in a ramshackle house that they cleaned and restored together. With their home grown vegetables, and rich creamy yoghurt and fresh eggs from their animals, they followed a simple but healthy lifestyle. Families, friends and neighbours all talked exuberantly about when their first baby might arrive, but months passed and then years without any sign of morning sickness, food cravings or catalogues from Gree-zha za Mike-ah-ta (Грижа за Майката, meaning ‘Mother Care’). Murmurs rang along the valleys… the Karavelova girl must be barren! And the only explanation they could find for this was that she had sat on the men’s window sill at the village shop on the night of Todor Zhivkov’s celebration.

In the forest Baba Zlata rubbed her hands with glee whilst singing There Ain’t No Party Like a Communist Party Party at the top of her croaky old voice.

‘Poor Mariyka!’ the villagers all wailed, ‘But at least her mother’s got shot of her at last, and she’ll have taken with her those awful gramophone records she polkas to all night long in her bedroom when she could be castrating pigs.’ Aleksandar, her husband, sank into a state of utter despair thinking that for all the good his mannishness was doing him, he might as well move into the sty with the young barrows.

Today there is little mention of that sad tale from seven decades ago, and nobody ever mentions how it ended, apart from the fall of totalitarianism and the appearance of Coca Cola and KitKats on the shelves in Mitko’s grandson’s shop next to the village mayor’s office. Sitting on the wrong ledge came to be accepted as a reliable form of contraception for some residents, and for their numerous children and grandchildren.

Recently I took a walk to the shop to buy a bag of flour and a jar of sows’ nipple ointment. Sitting outside on a window sill I saw Dyado Petr and Baba Stefka; a pair of love-struck octogenarians with little regard for what others might think. They’re both old enough to remember the fascism that preceded Bulgaria’s forty-five years of communism. During both eras, the harsh regulations had little impact on ordinary poor people whose lives would be tough no matter what the country’s political situation was. Such simple folk stayed at home to work the land, rarely finding the need to even travel the four kilometres of road from our village to the mediaeval city of Veliko Tarnovo. Modern European federalism affects them more than the dictatorships of the past did as new laws prohibit them from driving their donkey and cart on the big road, which is now a dual carriageway connecting Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, and Varna, it’s largest port. They can no longer earn a living from selling the misshapen peppers, tomatoes and patladzhan from their smallholding because misshapen is a concept that’s banned nowadays, just like Beatles records and Christmas were in the past. Even more upsetting for them is the pressure on them from Brussels to stop burning wood in their stove; their sole means of cooking food, heating water and keeping warm. But, on the other side of the stotinka, the new laws that have swept through the land have in some ways given them more freedom to enjoy their lives, as now they are at liberty to sit beside each other on the same window ledge at the shop. And having attained the ripe old age of eighty-six, neither of them worry about seismic activity or infertility anyway.

Image:

Dyado Petr driving his donkey and cart through our village. I have a similar photograph that includes Baba Stefka but I have already used it a while back on the ABC Tales website to illustrate a section from my journal entitled Mad Dogs and Donkeys.